This invention provides a helmet point-of-view training and monitoring method and apparatus that solves problems encountered in the training and monitoring of pilots of airplanes and other air, sea, land, and space vessels, or vehicles where the seating arrangement in the cockpit prevents an instructor or evaluator from sitting beside or directly observing the pilot's view of the controls and indicators in the cockpit, and the outside view from the pilot's position in the cockpit.
Piloting an air, sea, land, space vessel, or vehicle is an acquired skill that requires training. The training, when performed correctly, involves both the pilot's and the instructor's seeing and interpreting a great deal of subtle nuance of direction of attention, anticipation of events, and adjustments and responses. While some vessels or vehicles provide flight decks or pilot houses that allow a pilot in training and an instructor to sit or stand side by side and communicate using normal conversation and an essentially shared point of view, other vessels or vehicles have no room at all for an instructor, or require the instructor to sit behind or otherwise apart from the pilot, with the pilot and the equipment blocking any possibility of a shared point of view. For example, in a fighter jet type of airplane, the pilot sits alone in a crowded cockpit, strapped into a bulky ejection seat, and if there is any room at all for an instructor, such a seat is behind the pilot and the instructor has no shared point of view with the pilot. The same problem is encountered with other vessels and vehicles, and with any vessel or vehicle that is designed to accommodate only one person. Because the instructor cannot observe the nuances of the pilot's attention and actions, and vice-versa, the training of pilots under those conditions is affected negatively.
Flying or operating many of these vessels or vehicles is expensive, and so in-flight training is also expensive. There is a need to be able to “replay” and review training flights for the benefit of both the pilot and the instructor, in order to observe nuances that might have been overlooked during the actual flight. There is also a benefit to be gained by other pilots-in-training and by other instructors being able to review training flights.
Pilots wear flight helmets that are very expensive and are specifically fit and configured for an individual pilot. It would be cost-prohibitive to provide separate training helmets in order to implement any solution to convey the pilot's point of view to the instructor. Typical flight helmets have one or more visors that can be lifted out of the way under a visor shield mounted under the top front portion of the helmet. The typical helmet visor shield has an incorporated mount for a night vision device (NVD), which is often referred to colloquially as an “ANVIS mount.” The NVD-ANVIS mount is a military standard. The NVD-ANVIS mount has two angular bends, creating three different faces, with holes and slots to accommodate mounting studs on the night vision device or NVD. The NVD-ANVIS mount is fixed to the visor shield of the helmet so that a night vision device will be placed and held in a defined and fixed relationship to the helmet-wearer's face and eyes.
Standard, available camera mounts will not properly mount directly to the NVD-ANVIS mount. Standard camera mounts are designed to hold the “film plane” of a camera in relation to a single plane of, for instance, a tripod mount, bayonet mount, parachute-buckle mount, or Picatinny-rail mount, but not to the three different planes of the NVD-ANVIS mount. Therefore, an impediment to using available cameras in order to capture images from substantially the point of view of a pilot wearing a flight helmet is the lack of an apparatus to provide a single plane for camera mounting properly positioned in relation to a pilot's point of view.
There is thus a need for a method of capturing a stream of images from essentially a pilot's point of view and displaying those images in real time to an instructor and as recordings for review by pilots, instructors, and others, and an apparatus to allow the proper positioning of a camera for use in such a method.